Music

Noise Pop has come and gone for 2013. Another stellar job by the bookers, who find great buzz bands from all over the country, and stack them up four to a bill each night. Noise Pop shows aren’t like some concerts, where you stroll in midway though the second band, timing your arrival and beers for the headliner. At Noise Pop, the openers — who might have gotten so far as having a full-length album out yet, but maybe not — could be the best thing you see.

And on Night 3 of Noise Pop, in the cozy Brick and Mortar Music Hall under 101 in San Francisco, I first heard a band that I am now going to follow all over Austin this week. That band is Oakland’s own power-pop monsters, Warm Soda. Leader Matthew Melton may have not come up with the best name in rock, but the music is championship caliber. Melton previously headed Bare Wires, a band that exploded on contact with Austin last year, deciding to break up before the week was over. He returns with Warm Soda this year, hoping for a better outcome.Continue Reading →

My friends always want to know how you can see so many bands in such a short time. And still fit in all the barbecue and Tex-Mex food required in any trip to Austin. So this year I kept a diary of sorts. This is what SXSW feels like, to me. Listed in order, are the 58 sets of music I heard.

Brisket, pork ribs and sausage at Smitty’s in Lockhart, Texas.

TUESDAY: In anticipation of the music starting Tuesday night, 20 or so of my friends and I took a trip 35 miles south to Lockhart, the “Barbecue Capital of Texas,” intent on a barbecue crawl. The town has four joints that all claim top tier status in Texas barbecue. Two of them, Smitty’s and Kreuz’s, stem from a split in what was the pre-eminent barbecue family in the town. Because of that, another place called Black’s is able to claim, one huge billboards as you enter town, “Oldest barbecue restaurant, same family, in town.” Smitty’s looks like it came from an old Western, the “meat room” all brick and wood stained with decades of airborne grease, two fires burning in the corners with the smoke being fanned into the big smoker. Best brisket ever, damn good pork ribs. Want sauce? Not here, just taste the meat. Need a fork? “Your fork’s on the end of your arm.” With brisket like that, whatever you say.

Kickoff party at Hole in the Wall: Me and a bunch of friends helped put together a night of our favorite bands to get the week off to a good start.

1. Bremen Riot: Songwriter Mike Nicolai backed by the great Austin band Grand Champeen.
2. Mighty Deerlick: A Wisconsin band from the 80s that played the very first SXSW 25 years ago.3. Militant Babies: Not familiar with these guys. Most forgettable set of the night.4. Lil Cap n Travis: Had a few false starts getting into this Austin alt-country band’s records, but this was a good set.5. Vulture Whale: Birmingham, Alabama, outfit with great pop sensibilities and a Southern rock band’s work ethic.6. Grand Champeen: These guys never disappoint. Energetic poppy rock that wouldn’t feel out of place next to Soul Asylum or the Replacements. Aside from their two trips West in the last 10 years, SXSW is the only chance I ever get to see Champeen and it’s always a treat.7. Glossary: Great band from Murfreesboro, Tenn. Kinda like Thin Lizzy crossed with The Band.

WEDNESDAY: Hit the trade show. Bigger and better than ever as this is the first year the film, interactive and music trade shows are all combined into one. More food and booze out than ever. Made a full round of the place and had 4 beers, tons of chips, mini-sandwiches, heard some good band play, and got a pile of free t-shirts. On to the day shows:Continue Reading →

When Turtle Beach set out to make the most advanced gaming headset on the planet, I didn’t think they’d go this far. I figured having a wireless surround sound would be enough to amaze consumers, but the company known for its audio-related devices went beyond.

They took consumer feedback. They incorporated new ideas. They thought outside of the box. The result of all this hard work is the Ear Force PX5, which is the best set of gaming cans I’ve ever used. With its flagship headset, the Elmsford, N.Y.-based company thought of everything and redefined what headsets can be.

The PX5 has been basically living on my head for the past week. I’ve used them for gaming (of course), music and calls. It’s what I go to when I’m playing late at night so that the house can stay perfectly quiet. It’s what I used while doing work in the office. Here’s a break down of what I thought about them.

East Bay punk rock trio Green Day has come a long way since its major-label debut, Dookie, shot up the charts 16 years ago. Now the band is joining the music video game craze with the release of Green Day: Rock Band.

In the same vein as 2009′sThe Beatles: Rock Band, this game features the likenesses of Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tré Cool, looking different at three stages of their career together. You’ll play through 47 of the band’s tracks, including the complete Dookie and American Idiot albums. Those who have downloaded the six Green Day tracks from the Rock Band music store will also be able to complete the 21st Century Breakdown album, as those songs are recognized by this game. None of the band’s major studio releases is skipped, with at least two songs from each record. All tracks are exportable to your hard drive for a $10 fee, meaning you can play them with your Rock Band or Rock Band 2 disc as well.

She swooshes onto the stage at SF Yoshi’s like some big blond beautiful dream-come-true. And then, song by song, note by note, seductive phrasing by breathless swoon, Eliane Elias steals your heart away. Last night’s seduction was, at times, almost unbearable, as the Brazilian pianist/chanteuse slowly but surely won over her initially resistant audience. But after about a dozen songs, in both her clipped English that sets you up and sensuous Portuguese that sends you flying, Elias had the Yoshi’s crowd in the palm of her hand – and up on their feet – by the time the evening was done.

Don’t miss her tonight. Luckily for all of us, Yoshi’s has added a second show at 10 p.m. Get there!

Elias’ career spans a marvelous and gaping arch, from her teenaged beginnings in Sao Paulo to the global stature she enjoys nearly three decades later, a sweep as graceful and as breathtaking as the samba tones embedded in her music. With her smart jazz-piano stylings and a power-packed voice that can delight and mesmerize her listeners, Elias brought her Bossa Nova stories to San Francisco Tuesday for the first of a two-night stand at Yoshi’s.

She was by turns extremely hot and awfully cool on Tuesday, leading her talented and two-thirds Brazilian trio through a 90-minute flight to her beloved Brazil, where Elias first picked up her chops with singer/songwriter Toquinho and the legendary poet Vinicius de Moraes before heading for New York in 1981. Tucked tightly into a strapless black mini-dress with black glovelettes, Elias jumped in jammin’ and never stopped. Tossing her head back and forth like a 15-year-old in love with some wonderful guy, she transported the entire room back to the late Fifties, back to Rio de Janeiro where she cut her teeth on Bossa Nova with the very people who had spawned it.

She told stories between songs (about the time she looked up from her piano to see the god himself – Antonio Carlos Jobim – sitting at a table in the club she was playing as a young musician). She took soaring solos on classics like So Danca Samba, leaning into her Steinway with pure abandon and having way too much fun for one woman to have. And then she down-shifted, caressing every ounce of feeling she could from ballads like They Can’t Take That Away From Me. Her versions of Tangerine and the Girl from Ipanema were even more beautiful and moving than the ones I heard her do back at Iridium Jazz Club 15 years ago.

It was 10 years ago that I first decided to journey to Austin for what was the 14th edition of South by Southwest and I had friends who told me “It’s really not that good anymore, just too big.” It’s the kind of thing you hear all the time about big events like this. (I’d been incorrectly warned that Burning Man was no longer worth visiting before my first of four trips.) I ignored the naysayers and packed my bags and my love for music and headed to the Texas Hill Country. And the cautions proved ridiculous. It was the most fun I’d ever had in searching out new music, and one of the best travel experiences of my life as well.

And so I went back and back and back, now equipped to shoot down the buzz killers each year. The 2010 edition is my tenth, and about halfway through the first day, I actually started to wonder myself if the warnings had finally come true. It was impossible to drive around downtown Austin, every venue seemed overpacked, sound problems plagued several of the stages, too many attendees just seemed to be out to get drunk, hardly interested in the music at all. Had it just gotten too big, were there too many stages for the festival operators to manage?

The answers may be yes to all those questions, but the reason we all go to SXSW is the reason those answers proved moot: The Music. All it takes is a magical show by an old favorite band, or a great discovery of something new to make you forget the hassles and remember how great it can be when it all works.

My colleague, Jim Harrington, is already ticking off some of his favorite bands and I’ll jump in with mine.

Will Sheff of Okkervil River and Roky Erickson at the Paste party in Austin (Photo by Meri Simon)

Roky sans guitar. (Photo by Meri Simon)

More Roky (Photo by Meri Simon)

Roky Erickson and Okkervil River: Two Texas rock institutions have joined forces for a soon-to-be-released album and upcoming tour. Erickson is known to all Nuggets fans for the 1966 hit “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” recorded by his band The 13th Floor Elevators. Not long after that band disappeared, Erickson began a long, torturous tour through Texas state mental hospitals where he was subjected to involuntary electroshock therapy and drug treatments. Now, at 62, he’s recorded “True Love Cast Out All Evil” with Okkervil River, probably the hottest indie rock band in Austin. He’s still quite fragile, as the show at the Paste Magazine party here showed. But the songs are great, the backing by Okkervil River shows off some of the most powerful work that band has done, and the two will take to the road and hit the Bay Area in May, one of only four stops on their tour.

Surfer Blood: This W. Palm Beach, Fla. band came into the week with big buzz. Their official showcase gig drew a big crowd to one of the smaller venues on Sixth Street. Already veterans of one national tour, the quintet is making some of the most interesting indie pop around these days. Their debut full-length album, Astro Coast, sounds like a mashup of The Who and Psychedelic Furs, and the show was a revelation. Chiming guitar, catchy riffs and sizzling energy abound. The band will be back in the Bay Area for an Amoeba Records in-store on April 1, and a show at Bottom of the Hill April 2.

He is a flickering candle of a musician – brushing up against fame over and over again in a career now spanning six decades, only to have a chance at lasting celebrity nearly extinguised by critical insult, bad business deals and the vagaries of audiences who could never decide what to make of “Little” Jimmy Scott.

Now in his mid-eighties, the pencil-thin vocalist with the iconic and high-pitched contralto voice that made him a favorite of legends like Billie Holiday and Nancy Wilson is back on top. Kicking off a two-night stand Wednesday at Yoshi’s in San Francisco, Scott shared with a nearly-full house precisely the heartbreaking tone and charmed styling that first brought him to national prominence with the Lionel Hampton Band in the late 1940s.

It was that nearly angelic voice that first got him gigs as a teenager in clubs around his native Cleveland, sneaking out before the cops showed up, and that later got him with work with jazz greats from Lester Young to Ben Webster to Papa Jo Jones. And it’s flickering as beautifully as ever this week at Yoshi’s in San Francisco.

Wheeled out in a wheelchair by his wife, Jeanie, Scott treated his adoring crowd with a little over an hour’s worth of standards that the vocalist has given his personal touch to over the years – from an opening “Blue Skies” to “Angel of Mine” to “Pennies from Heaven.”

Struggling to find his voice, Scott wandered the upper and lower tonal reaches, straining to hit the right notes to a point where it seemed as if a younger Scott were trapped inside the body of this frail octagenarian. And yet, the power and magic of his voice, however weakened by time, was still there, with that cool sense of timing and that deep affection for vocal styling that always set him apart.

It was a strange but moving experience to hear this musical legend telling stories in song, smiling and nodding his head to the solos of his band members, waving his hands like a conductor, exuding a contagious sense of hope and love.

And when he repeated over and over the title refrain from “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” Scott, who lost his mother to a drunk driver when he was 13, had the room in the palm of his hand. And just when you wanted to cry, he and his band took the song out in a lush crescendo, then beamed at his audience with a smile that knew no end.

Scott and his band – The Jazz Expressions, led by bassist Hilliard Greene – play one more gig tonite at 8 p.m. at Yoshi’s SF. Catch him while you can. Little Jimmy’s a huge treasure to behold.

The voice was still there, strained and squeezed at times, but alive and electric and calling to the crowd from the 70s like out of some long dark tunnel of time.

But there he was: Donald Fagen, lording over the Fender Rhodes center-stage Sunday night at the Masonic Center in SF, leading a 13-piece band through two hours of suburban angst wrapped in jazzy chops and peppered with frenetic horn solos – a song list that a generation can’t get out of its head.

Fagen dug down into the keyboard, then leaned back, looking up at the heavens at that Stevie Wonder-like 45-degree angle, with longtime collaborator/soulmate Walter Becker standing a few feet to his right, the gentleman scholar on lead guitar, punching out more than thirty years of cherished rock licks that brought the audience of about 1,300 to its feet over and over again, as if sitting down was a show of disrespect.

With music driven forward by the strong smart bass lines of Oakland musician Freddie Washington, pumped up with a horn foursome that never let their energy drop an inch below the red-hot top, and laced lovingly with the soulful harmonies of the band’s three singers, Fagen took the crowd down the Memory Lane they had specifically requested on a ticketholders’ Internet survey ( described hilariously by its creators at http://radiodupree.blogspot.com/2009/06/steely-dan-live-2009-internet-request.html)

From 8:30 p.m. sharp, they were off and running, hand-delivering their past delicacies to a room filled with helpless dreamers and pot smoke. From Black Friday to Aja, from Hey Nineteen to Bodhisattva, the music unwound and filled the Masonic, while the two elder statesmen of rock-and-soul worked away, beaming, as if they, like their audience, had forgotten what year it was they were reelin’ in.

If you’re curious about how DJ Hero compares to real DJing, here’s a video featuring DJ Hero producer Derek Dutilly and DJ Blakey, a real-life DJ and the guy behind some of the game’s mixes. From the looks of it, the game mirrors actual DJ work fairly well.

It’s Michael Jackson’s final act and the world will be watching a star-studded lineup say farewell to the ‘King of Pop.’ Share your thoughts on the life and death of the “gloved one” in our live chat today beginning at 9 a.m.